Our trip plans published in early February also included a repetition of this travel only for the readers of Río Wang, from April 26 to May 1. However, the minibus for this travel is not yet full. I urge everyone who did not yet register but would like to, to do this until this weekend, otherwise we would have to cancel it (with great sorrow).

Soon we continue with the details of the further trips, especially with the closest, to Subotica/Szabadka on 15-16 March.

A quite small ship went on the sea.
It strongly illuminated for itself, and in order to be found.
The thin crescent moon and the Milky Way blinked back.
It deployed all navigation skills.
Maybe its maps were old. Or a mistake slipped in the calculation.
Sometimes, as if something moved at the edge of the horizon.
No one.

7.34. The Pest end of the Liberty Bridge, the Market Hall and the Karl Marx University of Economy seen from the Gellért Hill lookout

Quite some time now, we have written about the Black Ethnographer, who with great devotion searches through the houses of Moscow waiting for demolition and the abandoned villages of Russia, and saves whatever those moving out did not deem worthy to take with themselves: first of all, ten thousands of old family photos. The Hungarian version of our post bore the title “Fortepan in Kostroma”, with a hint to the highly popular Fortepan project, which does the same job in Hungary. Indeed, both collections are built up with objects found, and both play an important role in filling the hiatuses of collective memory. The Ethnographer’s recent posts, however, pull the relationship even closer. The large family photo album he found in an evacuated flat of Western Moscow’s Kuntsevo estate, also includes several Hungarian pictures from the 1950s and 60s. They show a Soviet army officer’s family, who apparently traveled a lot from the Crimea and Odessa through the village of the grandmother and Lwów as far as Prague, but some photos – a few Russian ones, perhaps some from Lwów, and those from Hungary certainly – suggest that the head of the family (and perhaps also other relatives/friends) did their military service in these places.

We have checked the hitherto uploaded seven parts, and sorted out the pictures – about fifty, one-seventh of the complete set – which surely or perhaps represent sites in Hungary. Here we publish them both in the form of large images and mosaic pieces. The number under each picture refers to the number of the respective part (see below) and the respective number within it. I urge our readers, who always willingly joined an invitation for a play, to review first these pictures and identify the sites represented in them, not sparing the eventual historical or emotive details. Obviously the Hungarian readers have a great advantage in this, but we will immediately add all information in the captions, so that you – and obviously the original author – can check them. And then look through the original photo series. Firstly, whether there are any additional Hungarian photos which escaped my attention. And on the other hand, because from these many fragments, sites, life scenes, beautiful or scary faces such a world and such lives emerge, whose knowledge – although they lived here among us, and moreover partly still live here – was absolutely impossible to most of us.

Germany, 1932: “Workers of the mind and of the fist: Vote for Hitler, the front fighter!”

Russia, 2005: “Civil Defense Vodka”

“За победу, товарищи!” – “For the victory, comrades!”

On the 2005 St. Petersburg International Wine and Vodka Fair, the “Civil Defense” of the Kristall vodka factory received the first prize in the “Golden Brand” category for “the high-level application of traditional Russian art and professional constructivist design.” In the designers’ own words:

“The style of the “Civil Defense”’s label was conceived in the spirit of early 20th-century poster art. Black, white and red colors, rigid, asymmetric shapes. The graphics even more underlines the emotional weight and the incapability of opportunism.”

On other compatibilities, equally incapable of opportunism, we have already written, and will also write more soon.

“…We’ll adorn all balconies like this,
On the red lanterns
We will paint the swastika,
So it shines wide and far.
Bobby says delightedly:
Our house will be adorned so
That everyone will know that here
German spirit and sense prevails!”

After the Anschluss – March 12, 1938 – any Austrian who wanted to position himself well, early expressed his loyalty to the new system. The children’s magazine Das Kleine Kinderblatt only three weeks later campaigned with the popular Bobby Bear for the referendum confirming the annexation, and later they published as the first item of the series with the Kleines Blatt around the world the table game Our homeland, Great Germany, where we arrive from Vienna through 254 stations to Berlin. On the edge of the map Bobby Bear and his friends are dancing again.

The Viennese publisher Günther & Co. went even further, by demonstrating not only who belongs to Great Germany, but also who does not. In the table game published by them already in 1936, the players walking about the city had to collect as many Jews as possible outside the city walls, from where they were then transported to Palestine.

Juden raus – Out with the Jews!

Zeige Geschick im Würfelspiel,
damit du sammelst der Juden viel!

Gelingt es dir 6 Juden rauszujagen,
so bist Du Sieger ohne zu fragen!

Auf nach Palästina!

Show your skill in dice game,
collect the most possible Jews!

If you succeeded in hunting down six Jews,
you’re the winner without any question!

Up to Palestine!

According to game historian Barbara Rogansky (1999) about one million (!) copies of the game were sold until Christmas 1938, when the company launched it on the market for a second time, expecting an even more favorable reception in the new system. However, the new system thoroughly disproved their expectations.

A few days after the release of the game, on December 29, 1938 a devastating critique appeared in Das Schwarze Kopf, the journal of the SS, with the title Judenproblem im Knobelbecher (Jewish problem in the dice cup). The party’s mouthpiece cast up with harsh words that while the national socialist movement makes huge efforts to suppress the Jewish mob, the Viennese publisher exploits the political effort, and degrades it to children’s pastime:

“We toil with the solution of the Jewish question not in order some enterprising toy manufacturers convert the problem into a business success and earn a lot with it, or they entertain the children with an exhilarating game. Out with the Jews, jawohl! but out with them also of the toy boxes of our children, before they are led to the grave error that political problems can be solved by the dice cups.”

The game immediately disappeared from the company’s catalog. We would be curious of the long face of the eager publisher on reading the fatal criticism. One thing he certainly learned from it, which has since been proven by every dictatorship. The independent initiative is unacceptable even when if it is in the interest of the regime. After all, this is the essence of the system.

We have written several times about the curious coincidences which link together with mysterious threads Spain and Hungary, these two fines terrae of old Europe. As one more recent example, the Hungarian and Spanish press published the same week that, thanks to the crisis and the astonishingly similar political climate, from both countries five hundred thousand people went abroad in search of work. Which of course means a different proportion in Hungary than in Spain, with a five times greater population.

It is even more astonishing that those leaving Spain in the past hundred years have said goodbye to their homeland and have remembered it abroad with the song of the Hungarian beggars.

José Serrano, Canción húngara, sung by José Carreras

The song is the last aria of the traditional zarzuela – piece of folk theatre – Alma de Dios, in which the Hungarian beggars, popping up as a colorful side episode, sing about their homesickness. Perhaps even the Hungarian and his bear sung this while wandering in the villages of the Pyrenees. The piece, written in 1907 by José Serrano, author of the Hymn of Valencia, was made extremely popular throughout Spain by this song. As Wang Wei recalls it:

In the 10s and 20s of the 20th century, with the success of the zarzuela (especially in the society of Madrid, from where the fashion spread throughout the country), this song became quite known and hummed by all kinds of people in Spain. My grandmother sung it with such a feeling as if she were an exiled Hungarian. I think an important reason of this was that in those years many people emigrated from Spain to America. The father of my grandmother moved right at that time to Havana to seek work. He returned home with more or less the same money as he left, but after long years of separation from his family, and, of course, older and more disillusioned.

Others also recall that their great-grandfather always sung this song while working in the fields. And it might be no accident that in recent years it has gained new popularity, performed by masters such as José Carreras, Alfredo Kraus and Plácido Domingo.